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A former youth worker who worked in residential care and AOD rehabilitation settings for more than a decade, I am now an active advocate for mental health consumers and carers. I blog about the people, places, and things I love.

It reports that Angela Merkel & Co are awaiting not only the passing of the Third Memorandum but also what kind of Greek government emerges after Wednesday night. It will not be the same government as exists today.

If anything, the article understates considerably what is happening already and is likely to happen. Also creeping in now, and in several similar pieces from European papers of record, is stronger language to describe the Left Platform of Syriza.

They are now “extremist”. That is more violent language than the earlier “hardline”, which was until last week the preferred usage in such quarters. “Extremist” was the word used by New Democracy prime minister Antonis Samaras.

It was part of an attempt to divert anti-fascist feeling following the murder of Pavlos Fyssas in September 2013 into support for a “constitutional arc”. That united all the mainstream, pro-memorandum parties against the “extremists” of Golden Dawn and, then the whole of, Syriza.

The article does not mention the 24-hour general strike taking place tomorrow. This is the first such strike since November of last year and it is not an incidental matter but an active factor in the political crisis.

Last Saturday 32 Syriza MPs, one way or another, failed to vote with the government. Two, including Yanis Varoufakis, were absent for the vote but indicated they would have voted yes.

Since then he has given his long interview in the London New Statesman. In it he describes how Tspiras and the leading group around him would not countenance taking defensive measures to the European Central Bank’s assault on the banking system of Greece the weekend the referendum was announced.

It’s anybody’s guess what Varoufakis will do now. His political stock would have been higher had he not, however, missed the vote to take a break on the island of Aegina last weekend.

The revolt will be sizeable. Positions held by those who in some way voiced opposition to the government three days ago are hardening. Dimitris Kordelas, an MP of the Maoist KOE organisation which is not part of the Left Platform, says he will vote No and then resign. Last Saturday he actively abstained, voted “present”.

There will be a lot of pressure on Syriza MPs who do vote No – possibly over 30 - to resign their seats. There is a party rule which says that that is what they should do. It cannot, however, be enforced over the rules of the parliament which give MPs the individual power over when and if they resign their seats.

Syriza, as it was known and elected in January, will not exist at the end of this week. Nor will this government.

The cabinet and ministerial team – the elected part of government – appointed in January entailed a series of balances. They were not reducible to the single axis – right, through centre to left.

Rather the government constituted a strong inner leading group around the prime ministerial office, with parcels of ministerial power allocated to different sectional groups.

The Greek constitution, like the British, gives a lot of power to the prime minister.

So – the right wing nationalists of ANEL got defence; respected human rights lawyers got justice and immigration; an old former right wing Pasok member, who as a professor taught senior police officers “criminology”, got policing; the patriotic wing got foreign affairs; a former Pasok minister was in as junior in economics with Tskalotos; the finance minister was Varoufakis; the left was given energy and industry - in much the same way as the late Tony Benn was given industry and then energy in the 1974-1979 Labour government in Britain.

There has been no evidence-led contradiction of Varoufakis’s account, by the way, of the clash he had in government which led to his resignation and replacement by Tsakalotos.

His account rings true to me. Throughout the 20th century there were mainstream figures – not social democratic or politically left – who faced with great crisis and an aggressive move have not hesitated, unlike the history of so much of the left in government, to act decisively.

They have been prepared, perhaps through lack of the hang up, which comes for some with being broadly of the left, of concern about provoking the powerful, aggressively to sacrifice the specific interests of some capitalists in order to serve the general interest of their national capitalism.

That’s what Roosevelt did in the US in the 1930s. In a very different way, that’s what Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s.

Now the government is breaking up. And not just between left and right. New balances will have to be struck. They will be much more unstable than what was before.

It has yet to dawn, I think, on the European commentariat just what it means for a government to fall like this in Greece and for Syriza to split.

I should add I’m not saying it is heading to a split because I have some great expectation of the left the party. I was not among those predicting the imminent appearance of a Plan B programme from the left and a campaign to organise forces around it in the last three weeks.

Rather it is based on two things 1) the fact that people are saying they are going to vote No and the right, leading the centre, of the party manoeuvring to expel them if they don’t split from the party whip, and 2) every single parliamentary party in Greece over the last three years has split.

That includes Syriza in 2012. The political crisis is immense and its logic ineluctable. What the split in Syriza will mean for developing a better radical or anti-capitalist left wing politics is an open question.

There will be big debates. Those will turn on politics. And that means strategy. And that means discussing the strategic failure of Syriza, the party, in government.

It’s childlike to have a kind of Lego view of how the fighting left ought to respond and recompose itself. As if it were just a matter of putting one, two or three blocks together to build a higher tower.

The nature, strategy and politics of what the left builds cannot be avoided or trivialised as “old debates”, “dogma” (that’s for people raising awkward questions), “principle” (that’s for oneself)…

For friends internationally of the Greek resistance to austerity and of the variegated forces of the fighting left I think the most important things are to rally the solidarity now, more than before, and to listen to, to immerse in, and seriously to partake of the open and vigorous debates.

We can’t afford simpleminded, boilerplate solutions. And we can’t wish away disappointment in one venture through investing in a new “heroic subject”: Podemos and Iglesis? Die Linke? French sovereigntism? Propagandist purism? A more left wing and anti-euro, smaller Syriza?

No one is in a position outside of Greece to declare what organisational arrangements the left here should adopt. Still less, now, to take one from Greece and seek to impose it at home. To declare: follow Syriza, or - we are like them, so join us.

At times over the last three years that’s ended up in some quarters with a rather totalitarian rhetoric. That’s never good. You cannot dictate to others to liquidate their strategies and structures. You have to convince.

With the historic capitulation of the government of Syriza, a party of the radical left, that would inhibit the process of rescuing a fighting left pole and building an effective force in the class struggle in Greece, which is becoming much more polarised.